Toyota and Danish Bjarke Ingels Group to build a prototype future city in Japan

LOS ANGELES, Jan 8, 2020, Forbes. Toyota Woven City is an urban prototype for the near future. The work of the Japanese car giant and Danish architecture firm BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group, this exciting project proposes a fully connected ecosystem, powered by hydrogen fuel cells. It is a living laboratory for testing and advancing mobility ideas – autonomy, connectivity, alternative-powered infrastructures. Announced at CES 2020, this is much more than a conceptual idea. Starting next year, Toyota Woven City will be constructed on a 708,200 m2 site on the foothills of Mount Fuji in Japan, Forbes reported.

There will be full-time residents here, as well as researchers testing and developing their ideas. The project is concerned with community-building – using technology positively to promote and assist social engagement while grounding this in history and nature. Toyota sees this as an opportunity to work with commercial and academic partners, scientists and researchers from around the world who will be invited here and encouraged to collaborate and create. The Woven City will be a place where people “live, work, play and participate in a living laboratory,” says Toyota Motor Corporation president Akio Toyoda.

As you can imagine, this is going to be a fully sustainable city with the aim of creating a new dynamic for vehicles, people and nature and (once tested) connected, clean and shared mobility to live happily together. The city will utilize solar energy, geothermal energy and hydrogen fuel cell technology to strive towards a carbon neutral society.

“As a replicable framework, it can serve both as a prototype for future cities and as a retrofit to current cities,” explains BIG’s founder, Bjarke Ingels. “By simply ‘reprogramming’ existing streets, we can begin to reset the balance between people, mobility and nature in cities as diverse as Tokyo or New York, Copenhagen or Barcelona.”

Central to the Woven City masterplan is the harmonious movement of vehicles – regular and driverless – and humans as a way of testing autonomous transport in a safe environment. To achieve this, BIG has designed a flexible network of streets, each dedicated to various transport speeds. So, a typical road will be split into three with one used as a primary road that s optimized for faster autonomous vehicles with logistical traffic underneath. Here the clean, driverless Toyota e-Palette will be primarily used for shared transportation and delivery services, as well as for mobile retail, food, medical clinics and so on.

The second street is a recreational promenade for micro-mobility, where bicycles, e-scooters and other personal transport can roam around freely. The third and final street is in fact a linear park – a path dedicated to pedestrians, to flora and fauna, with a trail designed for leisurely strolls so residents take in nature through the ecological corridor connecting Mount Fuji and the Susono Valley.

Since the Woven City aims to be carbon neutral, the buildings – residential and commercial – will be constructed primarily using local wood and through traditional Japanese joinery as well as advanced automated production methods. The roofs will be covered in photo-voltaic panels to generate solar power, adding to the energy produced by fuel cells. The city will be green too, with native vegetation and hydroponics introduced throughout.

Naturally, this futuristic city will have the latest human support technologies and in-home robotics to assist with daily life. Homes will use sensor-based AI to check on the occupants’ health, take care of basic needs and enhance daily life. Toyota says the project will provide an opportunity to test connected technology in a safe environment.

The three street types are woven into a 3×3 structured city block, each framing a courtyard, accessible via the promenade or park. Furthermore, the urban fabric of the woven grid expands and contracts to accommodate a variety of scales, programs and outdoor areas. These are flexible imagined areas so for instance, if needed for a special event, a courtyard can enlarge to the scale of a plaza. Finally, the infrastructure of the city – the hydrogen power, stormwater filtration and a goods delivery network – are all hidden from view in an underground network.

“Today the typical is a mess, with everything and nothing happening everywhere,” says Ingels candidly. The Toyota project allows him to “peel apart and then weave back together” the three elements of a typical street, but to adapt this for a new urban fabric – roads optimized for automation alone, others created with micro-mobility in mind and open space for pedestrians. Ingels explains that the resulting pattern of his “porous 3×3 city blocks” will promote corners that are ideal for social life, culture and commerce to develop. “In an age when technology is replacing and eliminating our traditional physical meeting places, we are increasingly more isolated than ever,” he says. “The Woven City is designed to allow technology to strengthen the public realm as a meeting place and to use connectivity to power human connectivity.”

Considered among the progressive architecture practices of today, BIG has been involved in many high-profile projects – from the 2 World Trade Center in New York and 8 House and Lego House in Denmark, to Google’s Mountain View and London headquarters. A decade ago, the firm took part in Audi Urban Future, another car-sponsored utopian project which sadly didn’t develop past its research phase. BIG’s concept then also questioned the nature of our rigid road structures, the design of which hasn’t evolved since early modern town planning. He envisaged a future city where autonomous shared pods transport citizens seamlessly thus eliminating the need for road clutter – traffic lights and signage – opening up spaces for parks and nature to develop.

Leon Rost, partner at BIG explains further: “The Woven City bridges the gap that exists today between vehicles and accessibility, by looking at mobility and public space as a symbiosis. Furthermore, by designing desirability as an element of accessibility – through nature, space and safety – we can ensure an active public realm in the city, especially for an aging Japanese population.”

The makers hope the design will encourage community building and placemaking; that the city, its architecture and design, will inspire technology to develop progressively. “Imagine a smart city that would allow researchers, engineers and scientists the opportunity to freely test technology such as autonomy, mobility as a service, personal mobility, robotics, smart home connected technology, AI and more, in a real-world environment,” says Toyoda. “This is a truly unique opportunity to create an entire community, or ‘city’ from the ground up and allow us to build an infrastructure of the future that is connected, digital and sustainable, powered by Toyota’s hydrogen fuel cell technology.”

He continues: “We welcome all those inspired to improve the way we live in the future to take advantage of his unique research ecosystem and join us in our quest to create an ever-better way of life and mobility for all.”

Nargess Banks

Tags: Japan